


learning curve

by cosmicwarden (necrotype)



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 03:16:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necrotype/pseuds/cosmicwarden
Summary: Venom indulges in some human pastimes. Eddie’s just along for the ride. (Small snippets of their life post-movie.)





	learning curve

**Author's Note:**

> this is very indulgent and feels very unfinished ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

_i._

Eddie wakes up in the middle of the night to find himself sitting on his couch instead of his bed, with the TV on at a low volume in front of him. He blinks blearily, then starts when that sinks in, and it’s only Venom’s intervention that stop them both from toppling onto the floor.

 **You should be sleeping still,** Venom chides. His head, manifested out from between Eddie’s shoulder blades, rejoins the shapeless black mass settled around his shoulders and neck, but doesn’t fade back under his skin.

“What are you watching?” Eddie asks between yawns. On the screen, a woman removes layers of cake from an oven and begins to hurriedly decorate them. Venom’s hunger is palpable, and it’s echoed by his own stomach, but it’s a weak feeling more than a real need.

 **Baking,** he replies. The words make Eddie’s collarbone vibrate, as if Venom is speaking them directly onto his skin, and he shivers a little. **Some of them are making chocolate cake. The rest are not. They will lose.**

One of the hosts flits across the screen as the music picks up, and Eddie finally recognizes what they’re watching. “Anne used to watch this. British Bake Off, or something like that.” He fiddles with the remote. “Season three? How long have you been watching this?”

 **Did you know that meat can go into pies, Eddie?** Venom asks instead. **We should make pies with meat in them. And chocolate.**

He shoves memories of the grocery store down the street at Eddie, flashes of the baking supply aisle and rows upon rows of raw meat in annoying plastic packaging. There is a pang in Eddie’s chest that he knows is Venom’s annoyance when he remembers the state of his kitchen, with its unclean pans and a barely functioning oven.

“That doesn’t sound appetizing.” It will, he considers, probably taste better than a human head. Venom has reassured him multiple times that the heads end up in Venom’s dark mass and not his own stomach, but it still unsettles him to think of human body parts in his stomach.

 **They will be delicious,** Venom hisses back. He curls more tightly around Eddie and seeps slightly back into his skin to curl around his ribcage as well. **Trust me, Eddie,** he says, earnest, into the curved bones.

“Sure, V,” he says around another yawn, even though he knows the meat and chocolate pies will be terrible. Warmth begins to trickle into his fingers as Venom spreads himself thinner to wrap long tendrils around Eddie’s hand in response.

 **Sleep, Eddie,** he says, strangely soothing and quiet, and Eddie dozes off as the judges begin tasting all of the cakes.

* * *

_ii._

There are only two playlists on Eddie’s Spotify account which belong to him, and the other twenty belong to Venom. ( **Ours,** he insists when Eddie points it out, **yours and ours both,** even though Eddie hasn’t heard of most of the artists he’s picked out.) He listens at night once Eddie has gone to sleep, quiet enough to not wake him.

It means that his phone is usually dead by morning, and Eddie wakes to both the familiar overwhelming feeling of hunger and Venom’s frustration about the poor state of his old phone and its shitty battery.

“What if I oversleep because I miss an alarm?” Eddie asks around his toothbrush, once they’ve eaten leftovers from last night’s takeout and a bag of Hershey’s kisses. It comes out a lot more garbled than that, but Venom knows what he meant anyway.

 **Wouldn’t let you,** Venom replies, petulant, from somewhere behind Eddie’s left ear. **We will always make sure you wake up when it is time.**

Eddie spits into the sink, then swirls water around his mouth for a moment. “You made me miss an appointment last week,” he says, looking up at the mirror to see Venom’s milky white eyes staring back at him.

His face contorts in frustration, and he sends a fast flood of emotions at Eddie, a mixture that’s mostly regret and annoyance. **Mistake,** Venom insists. **We were hungry, Eddie.**

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. He pats the curve of Venom’s cheekbone absentmindedly. “Maybe I should buy you an iPod, or something.”

* * *

_iii._

Eddie stops caring about the head-eating thing as much. That’s a little fucked up, he knows, but at the end of the day he would rather Venom eat someone else than his own organs. At the end of the day, there’s one less terrible person on the street.

(The definition of bad person, as it turns out, is on a sliding scale, and Eddie isn’t sure which of them is currently winning the argument.)

 **We will tear through you,** Venom snarls, his clawed hand wrapped around some asshole’s neck in a vice grip that makes the man’s eyes bulge out, **like tissue paper.**

The man stops struggling for a moment and fixes them with an incredulous look. “I—was that a _Galaxy_ —” The sentence ends in a shriek as Venom unhinges their jaw.

 _You cannot,_ Eddie cries in their mind, barely audible over the crunch of bones and Venom’s pleased hum, _make movie references when eating people!_

 **I just did,** Eddie, Venom points out, slowly, like Eddie is the weird one in this situation, and Eddie starts laughing a little bit hysterically. The amusement reverberates between them until Venom laughs too, mouth spread into a wide grin with bone shards between the teeth.

* * *

_iv._

Anne invites them out for dinner every other Thursday night, when Dan works an on-call shift, to a nice sushi place that Eddie wouldn’t be able to afford on his own, even with the cushy freelance work he has going on. It hurt at first, but Eddie’s stopped thinking about Anne as much these days. He isn’t even sure where the ring is anymore.

They order a platter meant for a group of ten. The waiter gives them a funny look—people always do these days, but Venom needs to eat and Eddie doesn’t care much about what anyone thinks anyway. As long as they don’t need to eat as many people, he’s happy, and Venom is fond of raw fish.

 **These are dead,** Venom sighs when the food arrives at their table, and Eddie laughs out loud. Anne raises her eyebrows at him, and he shrugs, pointing at his head. **Hoped they would be alive this time.**

“I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon,” Eddie replies. It’s hard to keep the fondness out of his voice. Anne raises her eyebrows a little higher, so he shrugs again, wordless.

 **Eat the salmon first.** Eddie’s hand moves before he can argue. Their motions are fluid now, the exchange between them for control no longer jarring or surprising. Venom holds chopsticks differently though, and it trips Eddie up every time they eat here. **Save the eel for last.**

“I don’t like eel,” Eddie says, but he lets Venom chew through every piece of salmon first without arguing. They eat slowly now, or at least more slowly and less like a crazed animal than before, so they’re not nearly finished when Anne begins asking about their week so far.

“It’s been a slow one,” Eddie admits. “We’ve just been sitting around, mostly.” He picks up another piece of fish partially to save himself from elaborating and partially because there is a sudden swell of affection from Venom at the word _we_ that makes him blush behind his ears.

“Oh,” she says after a moment, and then she smirks. “You didn’t seem like a homebody to me.”

Anne has a habit of looking just to the right of Eddie’s head when she’s speaking to Venom. It’s almost annoying, just like all of the other small things she and Dan do which separate Eddie and Venom from the single unit that they are, but she’s been a such good sport about the whole alien thing that Eddie can’t bring himself to say anything.

Not that it matters, because Venom quickly takes control of their joint body to reply and immediately chokes on the tuna Eddie had been chewing. They cough loudly, and more than a few people stop eating to stare. Anne is at least kind enough to hide her smile behind her hand.

 _Smooth,_ Eddie says drily. Venom snarls at him in their mind, but he only manages to wheeze out loud around the fish and rice. _Some parasite you are._

“Shut up,” Venom growls through their shared mouth, and Anne can’t stop herself from laughing then.

* * *

_v._

**This is boring, Eddie,** Venom whines from somewhere around his stomach. He is draped across Eddie’s bare torso like a blanket, and the black ooze is a strange mix of slick and dry, just barely warmer than room temperature, that he finds pleasant to touch. 

“Hey, asshole,” Eddie says, a little offended. “I like this movie.”

 **No fighting, just talking. What is there to like about this?** Venom huffs, and Eddie can just barely feel the scrape of teeth across his abdomen as Venom moves against him in irritation. **It’s boring. You’re boring.**

“You watch a lot of shows that don’t have any fighting,” Eddie points out. He eats another handful of popcorn. The taste of salt and fake butter on his tongue makes Venom sigh again, pleased this time, and he prods Eddie with a black tendril until he eats some more.

Eddie makes it another five minutes in to the movie without interruption, and then Venom moves with purpose and presses him firmly against the scratchy fabric of the couch. He can feel the emotions rolling off of Venom like they’re his own, boredom giving way to determination and the hunger that’s always present at some level.

“You’re awful, you know that?” Eddie asks, but he’s grinning down at the black mass that begins to spread out across his skin in thick, fluid lines and curls. He drops the remote on the side table, but leaves the volume turned up just to irritate Venom.

 **So much talking,** he says, halfway annoyed. It feels like his mouth is pressed against Eddie’s neck. He weaves himself into Eddie’s hair, around his wrists, down his legs, and Eddie just laughs under his breath instead of saying anything else.

Venom is harsh, but that’s mostly because it’s what Eddie wants. He presses into Eddie’s skin so hard that he leaves marks that heal moments later, and his teeth sometimes bite in too deeply and draw up little drops of blood. It makes Eddie light-headed and fills his thoughts with a pleasant buzzing static, and all he can focus on is the sharp way that Venom jerks him closer by his hair.

 **Eddie,** he says on repeat, very softly, a funny contrast to the rough way he leaves rounded bruises on Eddie’s hips.

Eddie laughs, breathless, too wound up to say much more than, “Look who’s talking so much now.”


End file.
